Recipes, Wrappers, Reasoning and Rate; A Digest of the First Reading Assessment.

Gallo, Donald R.

Conducted from October 1970 through August 1971, this assessment of reading was concerned with four age levels--9, 13, 17, and 26-35. A total of 98,016 people responded to a wide variety of reading exercises which were administered and scored by trained professionals. The results were then examined according to various group characteristics: sex, color, parental education, region of the country, and size and type of community (STOC). Reading objectives were formulated and reviewed by a cross section of scholars, educators, students, and lay citizens. The first five objectives represented the individual's ability to comprehend, analyze, use, reason logically, and make judgments concerning what he had read. The sixth reading objective was concerned with attitudes toward and interests in reading. Some of the results indicated that there is a correlation between membership in certain groups and a low or high level of success on reading exercises, that school-age males read consistently below females, that blacks were consistently below the national population, that people from the Southeastern States were consistently below their counterparts in other States, and that students from inner-city areas read less well than those from any other STOC group. (WR) Primary type of information provided by report: Results (Overview).